


No Use Pretending

by battle_cat



Category: Trust (TV 2018)
Genre: 1970s, Alcohol, Drugs, Greenwich Village, M/M, New York City, Primo can have a little night out in the gayborhood as a treat, Reunions, Sexual Content, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-18 23:34:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,394
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29990520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/battle_cat/pseuds/battle_cat
Summary: He hadn’t meant to see Paul again. Not really. There are perfectly legitimate business reasons for him to be visiting New York.It’s just that the boy is so incredibly easy to follow. And so Primo finds himself leaning against a car that’s not his across the street from the building on 21st Street where some artist friend of Paul’s has an apartment.
Relationships: John Paul Getty III/Primo Nizzuto
Comments: 12
Kudos: 32





	No Use Pretending

**Author's Note:**

> Takes place in the same timeline as [Three Times Is a Habit](https://archiveofourown.org/works/28797021/chapters/70621308), probably 1976-ish. I tried to leave it vague as to whether they've met up between that fic and this one, because I reserve the right to write more interactions between them if inspiration strikes.

He hadn’t meant to see Paul again. Not really. There are perfectly legitimate business reasons for him to be visiting New York; people it’s worth meeting face to face, and other people who might be allies or competitors or a body weighted down in the East River five years from now. It’s entirely plausible that poking around their territory now, understanding the lay of the land, could have some use in the future, if operations expand the way he talks about late at night after a drink or four with Leonardo.

He already hates New York. He’d hated the flight here, gritting his teeth through the ascent while the guys he’d brought as backup leaned over each other to gawk out the window like idiots. No, he’d never been on a plane before either, but he wasn’t about to advertise it like some country rube.

(He’d wanted to come alone. Easier to move around quietly when he didn’t have to look out for anyone else. Leo had eventually worn him down on that one. _“If you do something stupid and get yourself killed, at least someone else will know what happened.”_ )

Up close, the city is staggeringly filthy and falling apart, which he finds offensive somehow for a place that calls itself the greatest city on earth. At least Italian cities don’t put on any airs about being shiny and modern when they’re not. All the food is too sweet, even food that’s not supposed to be sweet, and the coffee is terrible.

The fact that Paul also happens to be here, his face confronting Primo from the background of a photo accompanying some gossip-rag piece about Andy Warhol, is entirely coincidental to the trip and something he arrives fully intending to ignore.

It’s just that the boy is so incredibly easy to follow. He leaves a trail a mile wide through the city’s nightlife, just as he had in Rome. And so Primo finds himself leaning against a car that’s not his across the street from the building on 21st Street where some artist friend of Paul’s has an apartment. He had only intended to look, to mark the place in his memory, perhaps, for reasons he tries not to think too hard about. But then Paul is right there, bouncing down the front steps of the building with his hands stuffed in the pockets of his denim jacket, his hair like a beacon in the glow of the streetlights.

There’s a moment in which Primo could turn his face away, start walking as if he is just passing through and avoid being seen. But he doesn’t do that, and then Paul looks across the street and sees him.

A split second of vivid confusion flickers across his face, and then he blinks, and then he _grins._

He jogs across the street, and then he doesn’t seem to know what to do with himself, standing a little too close, like he wants to lean in for a kiss but doesn’t quite dare. He settles for poking Primo in the shoulder.

“You’re real,” he says, still grinning, his pupils wide and dark. Already off his head on whatever the choice of intoxicants for the night is. It’s familiar in a way that’s almost charming. “Shit, man. What are you doing here?”

 _“Business,”_ he says, and leaves it at that.

“How’d you know where I was staying?”

“Paul,” he says, drawing the name out into two syllables. “I can find you.” It’s the kind of line he usually uses as a threat, so of course Paul smiles like it’s some romantic nonsense.

“Do you wanna— I mean, can we go somewhere? I was supposed to go to this stupid party, but we could, y’know, get a drink or something.”

He’s biting his lower lip, and Primo wants to be the one doing that. It’s not that he’s forgotten it, this desperate hunger, since the last time he saw Paul. He remembers it plenty—on late nights when no amount of alcohol will make him sleep, in Roman clubs when he tries to be satisfied with finding someone, anyone, to touch. But now that he is standing right here, the need to bury his hands in Paul’s hair is a physical ache. Paul, with his wide blue eyes and long limbs and soft mouth, Paul who _smiles_ when Primo turns up on his doorstep unannounced, who’s ready to drop whatever his plans were for the evening now that Primo is here.

 _“Get a drink,”_ he says. _“With your famous friends?”_

“Nah man, fuck that,” Paul says, that smile tugging at the corners of his mouth again. “I’ll take you somewhere better.”

They catch a rattling subway train, Paul strolling blithely through the broken emergency exit door next to the turnstiles without paying. Primo follows him up out of the graffiti-streaked tunnel at a station that must be somewhere downtown, although his grasp on the geography is still a little slippery.

His first thought is that of course Paul would bring him to a neighborhood like this. Hippies and freaks, long-haired bohemians smoking dope openly on the steps of the dark stone townhouses that line the street, rock and soul and disco music drifting out of the dim bars and clubs they pass, some with their doors propped open to the mild April night.

The further they walk into the neighborhood the weirder it gets: men dressed head to toe in leather, or dressed in nothing but a pair of cowboy boots and very short shorts. Women in sharp suits and broad-shouldered leather jackets, with their hair cut short or buzzed all the way to the scalp. Two dark-skinned ladies smoking outside a bar who look taller than him even before you add the elaborately styled hair and the platform heels.

He’s so distracted trying to figure out what the hell this place is that he doesn’t register the first couple of looks he gets as _those_ kind of looks, when he’s usually razor-keen at picking that up. But the guy leaning against the low railing outside a café, who rakes him up and down with his gaze, is unsubtle enough that something clicks into place. It seems absurd, everything out in the open like this, but once he looks past the ridiculous outfits he sees it everywhere, on almost every man loitering on the narrow sidewalks, all the little tells he would pick out in someone from across a dark club, the things that would make him follow a guy into the bathroom or the alley or the back room later that night.

“Dude,” Paul murmurs in his ear, with a hint of what might be pride. “Everyone is checking you out.” They’re walking shoulder to shoulder, and the next thing he knows Paul reaches down and twines their fingers together. He shakes him off instinctively. 

“Don’t worry, it’s cool here,” Paul says, but he doesn’t try to take Primo’s hand again. “Come on, there’s a place up here I like.”

Plenty of people are checking Paul out too, as they walk down the block. After the third or fourth guy tries to pick him up, Primo loops an arm through his, where he has his hands stuffed in his jacket pockets. If only to stop people _looking._ Out of the corner of his eye, he thinks he sees Paul bite back a smile.

 _“You come here often?”_ It’s still making his skin prickle, everything just out in the open like this, but at least he’s reasonably confident that none of these characters speak Italian.

Paul shrugs. “Sometimes.”

_“To find men who want to fuck you?”_

“Sometimes.” He looks slightly embarrassed by it. As if Primo cares who else he fucks. “It’s never as good as with you, though,” he adds, like it’s nothing. “It’s that place on the corner,” he says, nodding his head to a crowded-looking bar at the end of the block.

Primo clocks the Sicilian guy at the door from across the street, and the two other guys camped out smoking in a parked car in sight of the entrance. He drags Paul around the corner and down a side street, marching them past stately brick townhouses with a tight grip on Paul’s arm and one hand free to reach for the gun in his jacket, just in case.

“Ow, man, what the hell?”

 _“Not that place,”_ he hisses.

“Why not?”

_“Mafia bar. American Mafia.”_

“Be serious,” Paul scoffs.

 _“I am_ serious,” he snaps, adding the English for emphasis. _“Don’t go there. Don’t buy drugs there.”_

“Yeah, okay, I got it. Jeez,” Paul mutters, twisting his arm out of Primo’s grip. “Relax, man. We’ll go somewhere else.”

He’d learned as much as he could before he got here, from the cousin of a cousin who’d lived in East Harlem for a while before crossing the wrong person and suddenly rediscovering his love of the homeland. This particular detail hadn’t been mentioned as they sat with brandy glasses and cigarettes over the tourist-office map of New York City, piecing together Nicola’s spotty knowledge of how the American Cosa Nostra families divided up control of the city. But, well, he’s spent his whole life attuned to these things, as much as he’d learned to read animal tracks in the mud beside a stream or a lingering gaze from across a dimly-lit club, and he knows a mob-run business when he sees one.

They’ve circled back to the main street now, and this time he looks for different things. Picks out one and then another and then a half-dozen places up and down the block that make the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

The chances of anyone knowing him here are infinitesimal, and the chances of anything making its way back to someone at home even smaller than that. It still makes him feel exposed, in a totally different way than holding Paul’s hand on the street had.

He steers them back down another side street, onto a quieter block that’s mostly residential.

“So you’re telling me the mob runs gay bars?” Paul mutters when they’re halfway down the block, at a volume he obviously thinks is subtle.

Primo shrugs. _“It’s good business. People have nowhere else to go, they’ll pay what you charge them. You have a problem, with police, another business, the health inspector, you know the right person to make that go away.”_ It makes a grim sort of sense, once he thinks it through. Of course this whole place doesn’t run on a sudden abundance of tolerance for people like them. It runs on bribes.

He can tell Paul is watching him, waiting for him to make a decision about whether they stay or go, and the cautious attention grates for reasons he can’t understand. “Let’s just—” Paul tries after a minute. “Let’s just walk around for a bit, okay? If you see somewhere you wanna get a drink we’ll go in.”

He does want a drink, and a quiet corner in which to have a bump of the cocaine he has in his pocket, his own supply from home that he trusts not to be cut with laundry soap or worse. And maybe to get Paul to snort some off his finger, leaning close into his space with that stupid trust that makes something catch in his throat.

He feels a little calmer once they wander out by the waterfront, less crowded and closed-in than the narrow streets whose unintelligible grid makes him feel like he’s walking in circles. Maybe Paul has decided talking will relax him, because he provides a running commentary on the places they pass, one that makes it clear he comes here more often than _sometimes._

“The piers are amazing during the day, they’re all falling apart and forgotten and there’s just people hanging out, man, lying in the sun, kissing, fucking, just being themselves. The warehouses are dark as shit right now but there’s all kinds of art inside, I know a guy who’s putting up an installation in one. They’re abandoned but it’s kind of beautiful, man. Like flowers growing in the cracks in the pavement, you know? Art and people just flourishing where you think there shouldn’t be anything. Oh, and the trucks, they’re empty at night and people open the trailers and have sex in there. You climb up in one and there’s like ten or twenty guys, easy, all fucking. That hotel on the corner there’s been open since 1898; I know that’s not very old by your standards but it’s old for here. That club over there is wild; there’s a whole sex dungeon in the basement, all kind of fetish gear and stuff, and there’s this room with a big bathtub where people just go take a piss on guys who are into that. I think the building used to be a slaughterhouse.”

(The warehouses and the meatpacking plants and the west side waterfront are Genovese family territory; he’s pretty sure he remembers that one right.)

Eventually they find an unobtrusive little bar where the bouncer and the bartender don’t raise his hackles. It’s small and dim, half-underground, most of the other patrons Spanish or black, and working-class, by the look of everyone’s clothes. Paul sticks out more than ever here, but no one looks at them suspiciously or asks them to leave. There’s a small table free where he can see the entrance and sit with his back to the wall. They drink whisky out of scratched glasses, and eventually Paul charms the bartender into giving him the bottle, paid for with a wad of bills Primo passes him. They drink until Paul gets bold enough to sway to his feet and beckon Primo onto the tiny, sweaty dance floor, and Primo is hungry enough to follow him.

Primo’s not much for dancing, but what Paul considers _dancing_ is not much of anything anyway: his hips swaying vaguely under Primo’s hands, forearms resting on Primo’s shoulders, blue eyes ensnaring his gaze the whole time, as if he knows exactly what he does to him. They last a song and a half before they end up against the wall in a dark corner near the sound system, kissing each other breathless, the music thumping through them like a shared pulse.

After that he can’t resist dragging Paul into the bathroom and getting him off in one of the stalls, pinned against the wall with Primo’s hand down his pants, Paul’s fingers twisting desperately into his collar. It’s almost like the first time, in the back room of that club in Rome, but better under the bathroom’s unsparing fluorescents, because he can watch every tendon in Paul’s neck, his ripe mouth half-open as he tries to keep his rough breathing quiet, the way his eyes keep drifting closed; catch every detail and memorize it, seal it away for later, little caches of memory that he’ll pretend are sufficient to replace the real thing.

He doesn’t realize, until he’s had his hand tangled in Paul’s hair through his silent, shuddering climax, that something is different. He sweeps the curls back from his temple to get a better look at the perfectly-formed right ear that wasn’t there the last time he had his hands in Paul’s hair.

_“Good as new.”_

Paul looks slightly abashed, like Primo will have any opinion on it other than that rich people can afford some very convincing plastic surgery these days.

“Yeah. Something like that.” 

He seems perfectly happy to let Primo make a mess of his hair all over again, kissing him against the wall until someone raps on the stall door impatiently. He swings open the door ready to start something, but it’s two guys waiting quite openly to use the stall for the exact same purposes they had, one with his arm looped around the other’s waist, and he’s so startled by it he forgets to argue.

By the time they stumble out of the club they’re both drunk enough to be unsteady on their feet. Paul has an arm slung around Primo’s shoulders and Primo hasn’t found himself capable of pushing him away this time.

“Hey, man,” Paul slurs as the stagger up the steps to the sidewalk. “You should move here, you know? You could run a place like this.”

Primo scoffs.

“No, I’m serious, man. Why not?”

He thinks for a split second about trying to explain the hundred layers of reasons _why not,_ but Paul is already off and running with the exuberance of a drunk person who thinks they have a brilliant idea.

“There’s tons of places around here that are closed down, just waiting for someone to decide they’re worth something. You’ve got the startup cash now, right? You use the bar to launder the drug money and you’re all good.”

 _“And what? Fuck you in the back room in between cutting the coke?”_ He doesn’t mean for it to come out so harsh, or to shake Paul’s arm off his shoulder so roughly, but now that he’s going he can’t stop. _“Maybe Paul Getty can just run away from his life whenever he wants, but the rest of us have to live in the real world.”_

Paul recoils, a little bit of shock on his face underneath the hurt, the way he’d looked when Primo had slapped him, like he couldn’t quite believe Primo would do that despite every sign to the contrary.

Of course Paul, who cooks up fake kidnapping plans like he’s writing the plot of a movie, would genuinely believe it was that easy. As if Primo could just set up shop among the Five Families without getting shot before the ink on the lease was dry. As if he could just walk away from the empire he’s clawed out of the bare earth and expect—who? Leonardo?—to keep the shipping containers of cocaine rolling in like the deputy manager of some corporate subsidiary.

Everything he has now, he has fought for. And all of it is tied to Calabria. If he turns his back on that, he has nothing.

But why on earth should he expect Paul, full of eager, effortless fantasies, to understand any of that? He doesn’t even know what he’s angry about. Other than that, perhaps, for a split second, he’d imagined it too.

“Whatever, man,” Paul is saying, his face already closed shut on the delight of a moment ago. “I know it’s not that simple. I just thought we could, you know. Pretend. Just for a little while.”

Primo has never had much use for pretending things were some way other than they are. But he does catch Paul’s wrist, as he starts to turn away, pull him back in and kiss him there on the street, long enough and hard enough that someone wolf-whistles at them from a window above, but good-naturedly.

“Let’s go somewhere—can we…?” There’s a hint of pleading in Paul’s voice, breathed out against his lips, and he never has been very good at saying no to him.

He can’t imagine taking Paul back to the perfectly normal if slightly stuffy hotel Leonardo had booked for them in midtown. He’d given his backup the night off, and he’s sure that the guys are still out at one of the many strip clubs or peep shows the neighborhood around the hotel has to offer, but he can’t be sure. (The fact that Primo had swiped a tube of lubricant from one of the sex shops near the hotel, and had it in his jacket pocket when he went off to skulk around Paul’s friend’s apartment, is neither here nor there.) Maybe this strange neighborhood has gotten under his skin a little after all, but just for once, he doesn’t want to hide.

There’s a hotel they’d passed a few blocks back. Not the stately one that’s been open a whole seventy-eight years, but a cheap one, the kind that rents rooms by the month, for people without anywhere else to go, and by the hour, for sex. The lobby and the sidewalk outside are full of prostitutes—men, women, men dressed as women—and probably that’s what the clerk thinks is happening as Primo pays for the night. It doesn’t seem to bother Paul.

“Can I?” Paul murmurs when they get inside the narrow room, fingers teasing at Primo’s belt. He sinks to his knees without waiting for an answer.

He lets Paul suck him off against the door, a hand fisted hard into his hair, and then he fucks him pressed down into the bed’s scratchy, threadbare sheets. Paul has gotten more confident at everything; fluent in the way he uses his mouth, the way he adjusts his hips to find just the right angle to satisfy himself, little traces that other men have left on him, and it makes something raw and possessive claw its way up inside Primo’s ribcage, not so much anger that other men have fucked Paul but anger that he wasn’t the one there to do it. So when Paul gasps, “Please…leave a mark, so I know this really happened,” he does it gladly, over and over, sucking purple-red bruises into Paul’s neck, his collarbone, his hip, the tender inside of his thigh, thinking with each one _you’re mine, you’re mine, even if I never see you again you’re mine._

They fall asleep afterward, for a few minutes or an hour, and then they wake up and fuck again, and again, doing lines of coke off the table by the bed and each other, kissing and touching until they’re both ready to go again, kicking the blankets off the bed and rattling paint chips from the walls one time, Primo going so slow that Paul whines and squirms underneath him the next time.

He hasn’t said anything about only having one night to spend with Paul. But he already knows he can’t repeat this, and not because his schedule won’t allow it. Paul seems to sense it, too, clinging to him while he rocks in his lap as the early morning sun streaming through the window turns his hair into a bonfire, exhausted to the point of trembling but still desperate to keep touching him, hands buried in his sweaty hair and raw breath dragging across his face.

This time, they fall asleep tangled together until a knock from housekeeping wakes them. The middle-aged Puerto Rican maid has doubtless seen worse. A generous tip provided in advance earns them an extra hour in the room so they at least have time to shower. Primo does get Paul off once more, standing behind him under the tepid spray, one arm wrapped tight around his chest, Paul’s head tipped back against his shoulder. They’re still toweling off when the maid comes back.

On the steps outside the hotel, he pauses to light a cigarette. When he looks up from the flame, a young kid, sixteen, seventeen maybe, is sidling up to Paul.

“Hey man, you got a buck for an egg sandwich?” the kid asks, hugging his thin canvas jacket around him in the morning chill.

“Yeah, sure, I gotcha,” Paul says. He fumbles around in his pockets and comes up with a few crumpled bills, and then he’s offering a cigarette out of his own battered pack too, because of course he is.

The kid’s companion is standing a bit to the side, leaning on the fence and trying to look older and tougher than he is while guarding two duffel bags, baseball cap pulled down over his dark hair. They’re together; anyone can see that from the way they stand in reference to each other. Primo can see a lot more: the exhaustion of having wandered around all night with nowhere to sleep, the threadbare anxiety of trying to look like you know what you’re doing in an overwhelming, unfamiliar city, the faintest ghost of a bruise under the kid’s eye.

Some things are the same everywhere.

He’s a far richer man than he ever thought he’d be at that kid’s age, crisp American fifty-dollar bills lining his wallet now. He offers one to the dark-haired kid while Paul is busy chatting with the kid’s lover. He can see the wariness, the waiting for a quid pro quo, and he just holds a finger up to his mouth for quiet, because Paul will be just insufferable if he catches him doing something like this.

He hasn’t told Paul he needs to go yet. He should, but he hasn’t. So they wander around the decrepit piers, among holes in the pavement big enough to fall into and burnt-out cars and warehouses slowly folding in upon themselves.

It’s early, still, for this neighborhood, most people still sleeping off the effects of last night. A few early risers lie out in the morning sun, in underwear or nothing at all. Behind some unidentifiable ruin, a guy in a sparkly shirt is enjoying a surreptitious blowjob.

It all feels like a strange warped mirror of his own world in Gioia Tauro, the piers and the trucks, the meaning of each a foreign language here. A small slice of something stolen, carved out and claimed by people who were never supposed to have it. Allowed, for now, because no one else wants this place. But eventually someone will. Anyone with half a brain can see the potential of waterfront real estate. Especially in a city like this, constantly churning with new waves of people seeking something—money, fame, excitement, a better life, even if it’s only the chance to scrounge at more glamorous scraps. Sooner or later someone will recognize that a profit can be turned here, and then all of this will be gone.

It’s not gone quite yet, though. So he lets Paul pull him by the hand into one empty warehouse after another, showing him the vast abstract mural stretching across the ceiling of one, and his friend’s installation of sculptures made from repurposed industrial materials in another, which he frankly finds quite boring but likes listening to Paul talk about. He lets Paul lead him among the towering industrial ruins and crumbling concrete and decaying pilings that shirtless men sit on to chat or flirt. Stealing just a little more time, for now.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the (Sicilian-American) Mafia really did control most of the Village's gay bars, from the 1960s through the early 1980s. You can read about it [here](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/stonewall-why-did-mafia-own-bar/).
> 
> For a great sense of what the Christopher Street piers were like pre-gentrification, check out [this article](https://www.nyclgbtsites.org/site/greenwich-village-waterfront-and-the-christopher-street-pier/) and its many related links.


End file.
